Mestrado Bolonha em Economia

Policy Evaluation introduces students to the foundations of public policy design. Students will learn methods that allow establishing causal inference between exposure to programs and public policies with their outcomes, as well as the importance of behavioural science in the promotion and design of public policies in different areas such as health, education, social security, taxation, and the environment. This discipline has two main objectives: 1) a broad understanding of various social and economic issues that policymakers face, and 2) obtaining essential tools for future public policy researchers, as well as for policymakers, program managers, consultants, and advisors so that public policies are designed, implemented, and evaluated efficiently and effectively. This course is designed to give students the opportunity to choose, according to their own academic and professional interests, the topics they want to delve into. For each topic/lecture, a more specialized complementary bibliography will be indicated. This bibliography can be read individually or in groups through the creation of "reading and discussion groups" that enhance understanding and discussion of the topics. This discipline uses recent empirical examples from studies published in the most prestigious international scientific journals to motivate the use of (quasi-) experimental frontier scientific methods in the evaluation of public policies. These real-world policy applications will be presented in a non-technical and analytical manner. In this context, the course will provide an introduction to basic methods in data science, including regression, causal inference, and machine learning. Without neglecting economic theory and in-depth knowledge of institutional details, the goal is to estimate the causal impact of events and choices on a specific outcome of interest. The increase in computing power, the advent of big data, and new statistical and econometric techniques have given a new impetus to our better understanding of the effects of public policies. This discipline will take into account the importance of behavioural science in the design, implementation, and evaluation of public policies. We will also familiarize ourselves with concepts such as nudges. Finally, we will address recent methods for calculating the costbenefit of different policies. The course will use Stata software to showcase the main methods, but R and Phyton are also accepted in the evaluation components.